[comics] Jack Kirby Was The 20th Century …

He was the existential loner outcast from society who sought solace by riding the waves (the Silver Surfer). He was the military industrial complex (Nick Fury). He was the hippies who rejected the Cold War consensus, and wanted to create their own counterculture (the Forever People). He was the artist who tried to escape his degrading background (Mister Miracle). He was feminism (Big Barda). He was Nixon and the religious right (Darkseid and Glorious Godfrey).

[wisdom] Malcolm Tucker on Bloggers: ‘I read all the blogs because I’m an under-employed fat fucking loser with nothing better to do with my time than sit in my bedroom like a fat space hopper in a tracksuit reading inconsequential, un-spellchecked shit, fabricated by other fat fucking losers.’

[funny] Little Kid Does Worlds Best Batman Spoof … “Max, what do you want for dinner?” “JUSTICE!”

[internet] In Praise of Online Obscurity … ‘In 2007, [Maureen Evans] began a nifty project: tweeting recipes, each condensed to 140 characters. She soon amassed 3,000 followers, but her online life still felt like a small town: Among the regulars, people knew each other and enjoyed conversing. But as her audience grew and grew, eventually cracking 13,000, the sense of community evaporated. People stopped talking to one another or even talking to her. “It became dead silence,” she marvels. Why? Because socializing doesn’t scale…’

[comics] Wilson … Tom Spurgeon produces the first review of Wilson – Dan Clowes latest comic … ‘It’s Clowes being Clowes, and Wilson all by itself makes 2010 a pretty good year for comics no matter what happens from here on out.’

[google] How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web … Steven Levy is given an interesting look behind the scenes into Google’s search engine …

Indeed, [Microsoft] the company that won last decade’s browser war has a best-served-cold approach to search, an eerie certainty that at some point, people are going to want more than what Google’s algorithm can provide. “If we don’t have a paradigm shift, it’s going to be very, very difficult to compete with the current winners,” says Harry Shum, Microsoft’s head of core search development. “But our view is that there will be a paradigm shift.”

[funny] Worth A Look: Underskin – A Map Of The Human Body … Brainiac has no time for love … Superhero Headquarters

[lmg] Ten Years Of Link Blogging … Ten years and 5407 posts to be exact – I did it. As we say on the internets: OMFG! w00t! FTMFW!

[quote] ‘What’ll it be next? Choice extracts from the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations? Trotting out the Nietzsche and the Shelley to dignify some old costumed claptrap? Probably. Sometimes you wonder, in an interconnected universe, who’s dreaming who? — Grant Morrison.

[quote] ‘Nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day. There’s genocide, war, corruption. Every fucking day, somewhere in the world, somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else. Every fucking day, someone, somewhere makes a conscious decision to destroy someone else. People find love, people lose it. For Christ’s sake, a child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church. Someone goes hungry. Somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman. If you can’t find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don’t know crap about life.’ — Robert McKee in Adaptation.

[quote] ‘The best you can hope for in this life is that your delusions are benign and your compulsions have utility.’ — Scott Adams, Crazy or Disciplined?

[quote] Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72:

On page 39 of California Living magazine I found a hand-lettered ad from the McDonald’s Hamburger Corporation, one of Nixon’s big contributors in the ’72 presidential campaign: PRESS ON, it said. NOTHING IN THE WORLD CAN TAKE THE PLACE OF PERSISTENCE. TALENT WILL NOT: NOTHING IS MORE COMMON THAN UNSUCCESSFUL MEN WITH TALENT. GENIUS WILL NOT: UNREWARDED GENIUS IS ALMOST A PROVERB. EDUCATION ALONE WILL NOT: THE WORLD IS FULL OF EDUCATED DERELICTS. PERSISTENCE AND DETERMINATION ALONE ARE OMNIPOTENT. I read it several times before I grasped the full meaning.

[religion] God Watches You Google … a religious blog poses the question of how we should feel about the morality (or lack of) displayed in our search requests …

This woman goes from searching about pregnancy, to realizing that the father does not want to keep the baby, to researching abortion clinics, to researching whether she can, according to her faith, choose abortion, to dealing with a miscarriage. And at the end of it all, life goes on and she seems ready to be married.

What is so amazing about these searches is the way people transition seamlessly from the normal and mundane to the outrageous and perverse. They are, thus, an apt reflection of real life. The user who is in one moment searching for information about a computer game may in the next be looking for the most violent pornography he can imagine. Back and forth it goes…

[blogs] The Power Of Ten … Meg Pickard celebrates 10 years of blogging. Congratulations Meg! :) … ‘A decade feels like a long time in so many ways – when I look back at my early posts and think about what I was doing back then and where I was in life, I am amazed how far away it feels. But throughout those ten years there have been very few of the 3692 days (more or less) when I haven’t written something on the blog, or scribbled something in draft, or at very least thought about it and felt guilty for not having sufficient time to devote to doing it.’

[funny] Worth a Look: Unhappy Hipsters … Coming Soon From BBC Worldwide … 10 Reasons To Avoid Talking On The Phone.

[comics] The 6 Most Realistic Moments In “Kick-Ass” … ‘Completing the Hit Girl Realisim Trifecta, there’s the scene where she–again, a tiny child–accurately shoots a pistol in each hand, scoring headshots on a roomful of bad guys. Issues of recoil are, of course, negated by the littlegirlium factor…’

[comics] Happy 10th Blogiversary Neilalien! … as far as I know Neilalien’s blog and Doctor Strange / Steve Ditko fan site was the first comic blog. Amazingly, after ten years he still seems to handroll his own blog pages, which proves he’s either old school or an alien – I can’t make up my mind which… Congratulations Neil!

[comics] Jack Kirby’s Visual Interpretations of God … ‘I always found it interesting that of the very few pieces of his own work that Jack Kirby displayed in his home, three of them were his visual interpretations of God.’

[politics] Glanced At: Steve Bell On The National Bullying Helpline.

[comics] Kevin O’Neill Interview [Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five] … huge interview covering O’Neill’s 40 year career in comics … ‘What Robocop did by beating Judge Dredd to the screen was it stole the best of Judge Dredd, and when they made the Dredd movie, they were then worried about being compared with Robocop! So they took out all the black humor and all the satire, and their emasculated movie was almost a Judge Dredd movie, but not quite. Robocop was a more energetic movie. We did hear there were piles of 2000 ADs in the production offices. That does kind of show, doesn’t it?’ [via Metafilter]

[war] Lost Nazi nuke-project uranium found in Dutch scrapyard … ‘Forensic nuke scientists at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) traced two pieces of metal – described as a cube and a plate – back to their exact origins and dates. Apparently both came from ores extracted at the “Joachimsthal” mine in what is now the Czech Republic, though the two are from different production batches.The cube, according to specialists at the JRC’s Institute for Transuranium Elements (ITU), was produced in 1943 for the Nazi nuclear programme and was used in the lab of famous boffin Werner Heisenberg (of uncertainty principle fame).’

[politics] Adam Curtis On How All Of Us Have Become Richard Nixon … ‘Just like him we have all become paranoid weirdos.’ [more…]

[books] Hare-brained: Kit Williams’ Masquerade … The long and engrossing story behind the creation of Kit Williams’ Masquerade treasure hunt and it’s eventual solution … ‘The national newspapers followed up the Thomas story all week, faithfully repeating the version of events he’d given to Williams. They were particularly pleased with the notion that all these eggheads could have been defeated by Masquerade’s puzzle, only to see the hare finally discovered by a dog who stopped to pee on a random stone. This was the single aspect of the story which every newspaper emphasised, and it’s still the one thing which most casual readers know – or think they know – about Masquerade today.’ [via Metafilter]

[funny] Worth A Look: Mindfuck … I’ll Just The Browse The Web For A Few Minutes … Skiing Batmen

[comics] Paradax: the TV show … according to internet rumours Brendan McCarthy is in Hollywood pitching Paradax as a animated TV Show … ‘Bad Boy Superhero: Smallville meets Entourage’

[funny] It’s Simple – Kill The Batman …

[movies] Kosmograd: Why 2010 wont be like ‘2010’ … why the imagery and portrayal of computers in the 1984 film 2010 doesn’t match up to the computers we use today … ‘Unlike the computers of 2010, the computers in ‘2010’ do not create space. The computers of the Leonov, and even HAL 9000 on the Discovery, are little more than tools or automatons, tactile and solid. Whereas HAL looked out into our world, today we look into the world created within the computer.’

[books] Henry Sutton’s top 10 Unreliable Narrators … On The Killer Inside Me: ‘It was Jim Thompson, not James M Cain, who put the hard into hard-boiled, the noir into roman noir. He was also one of the first crime writers to take us into the heads of seriously twisted killers, if not out-and-out psychopaths. Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford is regarded as a pillar of the small Texan community he serves. Yet he’s in possession of a secret he doesn’t even admit to himself. When the bodies start to appear, the net slowly tightens.’

[fun] Worth A Look: Escher’s “Relativity” in LEGO … Comic Book Ad Browser … How To Suck A Facebook

[internet] A Crime of Shadows .. a really disturbing look at how potential sexual predators are entrapped on the internet by U.S. Police … ‘J was guilty of some things, serious things. He was guilty of saying he wanted to have sex with two imaginary children. He was guilty of being a troubled soul in a bad marriage, of abusing steroids, of a lifelong inability to establish a healthy intimacy with a woman, and of being morally adrift in a netherworld of illicit sexual desire. He was guilty of lacking moral boundaries and good sense…’ [via Metafilter]